Mandate Tracking Website Released by the Northwest Territories

A new governmental mandate reporting website, launched by the Government of the Northwest Territories, went online on November 4th, 2016. The purpose of the website is to promote governmental transparency, allowing citizens to track their government’s progress in achieving their mandates. The website can be seen here.

The website groups the mandates into five major themes. The themes of the mandates are, as listed on Government of Northwest Territories’ website:

Governance

Economy, environment and climate change

Cost of living

Education, training and youth development

Community wellness and safety

The website has an intuitive and simple design. Making effective use of graphics to make a survey of the website and the government’s progress easy and accessible. The website does not feature walls of text, rather using a simple grid format within each theme to list the mandates, show the timeline for its compilation, and coloured nodes standing for major milestones in the mandates progress. The colour of the nodes stands for the current state of the milestone, if its been fulfilled, is in progress, or is still in the planning stage. In the future, I believe the addition of a colour for when the government does not reach a milestone would helpful in promoting even more transparency. That said I am hopeful such a colour would rarely need to be used.

Governmental transparency is something all governments should strive for. It is crucial, in my opinion, for citizens to be able to see into the inner workings of their government and judge for themselves if they like what they see. The Government of the Northwest Territories’ new website is an encouraging step in that direction, allowing the citizens to better see what their elected officials are achieving. I would love to see other governments, at all levels, follow suit.

As Bob McLeod, the premier of the Northwest Territories, was quoted as saying on their website and in the news release for their new website, “Open Government is good government”.

This blog post was written by a CCLA-PBSC RightsWatch student. Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the view of the CCLA or PBSC.